no third solution

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Category Archives: Rants

Monsters on Patrol: Prince George County Maryland

September 24th, 2010

It seems the heroes of Prince George County are back to their old routine. That routine, of course, being systematically abusing the people they are supposed to protect and serve, and also murdering their dogs.  Via InformationLiberation.com

Family Gets Robbed, Calls Cops For Help – Cops “Help” By Beating Them Up and Killing Their Dog

As he was being assaulted by his armed and dangerous protectors, he begged the officers not to shoot his four-year-old dog, Mercedes.

“While this was going on I said ‘please, don’t point a gun at my dog.’ I begged her. She didn’t need to be involved in this. She was in the yard.”

Police then dutifully proceeded to murder his dog, who as his Neighbor Barbara Wells said, “…did not attack anyone. He never approached anyone. Even as the officers grabbed Sterling the dog didn’t do anything.”

This of course seems to be par for the course in Prince George County. If you think I’m blowing this out of proportion, take a look at Radley’s archives detailing the very colorful history of this department.

  • They killed their own mayor’s dog during a botched “drug raid”. How they didn’t know it was they mayor’s house is beyond me. Those officers involved in the raid were eventually cleared of any wrongdoing.
  • This is the department which continues to harass and threaten to imprison people for “recording” cops in public.
  • This is the department which keeps on its active rosters an officer who shot two furniture movers, killing one of them.
  • This is the department which routinely “loses” dash cam footage or other surveillance footage when it differs from the official (i.e., officer-reported) version of events.
  • The very same department which has on its roster an officer who has been arrested for drunk driving four-time within 12 months — at least once while in his patrol car. Still on duty.
  • And if that’s not enough, yet another officer of PG was drunk-driving his squad car when he hit and killed a 20-year old college student.

These monsters don’t suddenly appear, they grow and are nurtured in an environment and culture which protects its own at almost all costs, almost always. They learn to abuse because they learn they can get away with abuse. For every bad, abusive, dangerous, sociopath cop in the world, there’s at least one “good” cop that doesn’t do a goddamn thing about it. It’s this refusal to bring justice that enables the worst, and they are every bit as guilty as accomplices to these crimes.

I’m not militant. I’m not violent. I would consider myself a borderline pacifist.  I don’t advocate violence as a means to any ends.

That said, the world would be a noticeably better place if that department burned to the ground with everyone inside it.

An Open Letter to “Libertarians” Against Immigration Amnesty

May 6th, 2010

If you are one of these ‘libertarians’, who oppose amnesty for migrant workers, who oppose open borders and freedom of travel, employ and commerce, this letter is addressed to you.

Dear “Libertarians”,

I notice a lot of you like to say that brown people in third world countries accept low-wage, hard-labor jobs because that’s better than the alternative (namely: subsistence farming). You argue that this is how the invisible hand of the “free market” works.

No, it’s fucking not.

The only reason they are condemned to these choices is because they had the misfortune of being born in some banana republic, some petty dictatorship, or some ass-backward third-world country. Viz., some place you ‘libertarians’ would never — ever — want to find yourselves; you would kick, punch, claw, gouge and shoot your way out. You would climb mountains, cross deserts, or navigate shark-infested oceans in order to find something better.

But when I bring up immigration, I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about them. You’re worried that if people emigrate, you might not pull down $18/hour plus benefits to be a high school custodian — as if being compelled by the forces of supply and demand to accept a $13/hour gig instead is a degradation even remotely similar to being locked in some craphole third-world country making $100 shoes for 8 cents a day.

You’re saying, “I’m all for the free market as long as I get to play by a different set of rules [than immigrants and residents of LDCs]”. But that’s not how a “free market” works.

You do not get to exempt yourself from the workings of the free market and still call it a “free market”. The same forces which might compel a migrant worker to pick cherries in Traverse City, or to work ‘illegally’ doing midnight shifts at the gas station, may also compel you to sacrifice that vacation home, or the third flat-screen TV, or the brand-new car for your daughter’s sweet sixteen, or your microbrews, or your Marlboros or your expensive tennis shoes and video games — so that those oppressed and disenfrachised can feed their fucking families.

Take a good, long, hard look in the mirror. You are not an advocate of the ‘invisible hand’.
You are an apologist for the ‘invisible fist’, punching all of humanity in the throat, forever.

Sincerely,

David Zemens

The Lightswitch Mentality

March 9th, 2010

An old thread on a forum I participate in was revived the other day, and I had an (ahem…) interesting discussion with a self-described police officer about drug legalization. Can you see where this is going? I’d rather not bore you with the ins and outs of the discussion (if you could call it that…), but suffice to say he was no stranger to shifting goalposts and reductio fallacies. I won’t rehash that, chances are you’ve had similar “discussions” with similar people in the past.

At one point, someone else must’ve asked him how he can possibly sleep at night. The guy says he turns off “cop mode” when he goes home, and sleeps soundly every night. Apparently, he thinks “cop mode” is a lightswitch. Turn it on or turn it off, at will.

Thing is, his words indicated otherwise—that he was completely incapable of flipping that switch to the “off” position. You know, like, everyone who’s ever smoked pot is a “thug” or a “worthless hippy” and they’re ruining ‘Merica and they all deserve to go to jail and when he goes to work tonight he’s just itching to bust someone for “possession of marijuana”. That’s how irate, how flat-out vindictive he gets when people challenge the legitimacy of a law—he wants to bust some kid merely because some other people on the internet disagree with him.

Too bad his “dickhead mode” didn’t come with an on/off switch. But I digress.

This lightswitch mentality is a huge part of the problem. It’s compartementalization, it’s what sociopaths do. It is what leads people down the path of “I was just following orders,” or “I was just doing my job,” or “I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them,” and so on.

The idea that you become something other than a belligerent with a gun and a club the moment you punch out at shift’s-end is how people rationalize, how they convince themselves that what they’re doing isn’t wrong at all. When they leave work, they’re just a “regular guy” like you and me; they have families and feelings and they like baseball and apple pie.

No, you’re fucking not a “regular guy”. A “regular guy” isn’t vindictive and belligerent. A “regular guy” doesn’t make thinly-veiled threats on internet forums (he actually said he was going to report the thread to local law enforcement—as if talking about legalization is a crime!). A “regular guy” doesn’t get a hard-on every time someone says that just maybe the war on drugs is a stupid idea and just maybe responsible adults should be allowed to be responsible on their own time.  A “regular guy” doesn’t think it’s OK for people to be shot to death for smoking a joint.

No. You’re pretty fucking far from “regular”.

no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics